Rating: +0
* This was selected as Best Answer
Bob,
The world domination answer (above) is probably the closest to the truth. With the price of storage and number of mid-tier storage manufacturers competing for a piece of the data center the prices will just continue to drop taking away any notion of a cost barrier. Also, the worldwide emphasis of "Green" plays into the Google advantage as nearly all manufacturers whether they are high end or mid-tier players have to incorporate a "green" strategy into their product lines, and in this case Google is the "consumer" so they get those benefits as well from the lower-tier storage providers.
Google provides a significant advantage in their email delivery which is the full-text indexing (which by the way adds on average about 10-15% of the original data size), and integrated search results list from Google Desktop to incorporate local c:\ search results with your Google gmail search results, and all for free.
The key thing to remember is that free comes with a price, which is no guarantee of delivery, service, etc. It's a pretty safe bet that an entity like Google is pretty darn good at delivering internet related application services, especially a technology that is so well cemented like e-mail, but if you login one day and your Inbox is empty there was never any warranties, that’s the trade-off, risk.
If they were to deliver a quality of service and SLA and redundancy, etc. around those mail stores, their infrastructure and people costs would double, maybe triple, they couldn't use cheaper drives, etc. So, so much is dependent on redundant feature guarantee or more specifically lack of those features. Also, in the grand-scheme of things 6GB is nothing, even multiplied times a few million users is just peta-bytes, not even exabytes or zettabytes yet, when you consider that the average corporation can sock away a few peta-bytes over three to five years and manage it with their IT staff, you have to figure that Google can do the same to an order of enormous magnitude. So the playing possibilities are definitely endless!
Google is moving to take over the Unified Communications strategy, with their mobile phones, email, and GrandCentral (www.grandcentral.com) to incorporate feature rich voice communications. It's a great convergence waiting to happen. They are still getting their feet wet and learning as they go, but their goal is pretty obvious.
Good Luck,
Peter
January 2008
Links:
* http://www.grandcentral.com